Winning with a smaller army
Applying lessons from battles past to your life
Throughout history there are stories of great battles where a much smaller force has won out against all odds and triumphed over a much larger force. How is this possible? How can an army that is outnumbered 5 to 1, or 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 prevail?
What can we learn from it?
The first lesson you can learn is the importance of leadership. Leaders emerge at critical times to make a difference.
Like any human endeavor the top reason any, large or small, wins is leadership. They believe that they can win. It is that leader who believes the impossible, against long odds, and believes to such an extent that their forces will rally behind them – that is the basis of all victories.
Sometimes there isn’t a choice. The army is surrounded and outnumbered in a hostile country and all the generals are tricked into a parley and slaughtered. This once happened to 10,000 Greek mercenaries. There was no retreat. There was no option of surrender. The situation appeared hopeless. Then they elected Xenophon as the new leader and he led the 10,000 on a long march through Persia and back to Europe the whole time being pursued by a larger force.
The skillful leader converts the siege mentality into an Esprit de Corps. “We’re all we’ve got, we’re in this together, so what are we going to do about it?”
A leader emerges that uses that hopelessness and turns it into positive energy. That leader asks a different set of questions. Instead of asking “How did we get into this trap?” They ask, “What about this situation can we use to our advantage?” And “How do we win?”
Whether in war or business or in the community, good leaders can turn anything around. They can covert a defeated and broken mob into a unified and effective force.
Once the leadership is in place what can they do then to gain advantage in an outnumbered situation?
What are the possible advantages when you’re outnumbered 100 to 1? What can be used to capitalize on the smaller army’s strength and the larger army’s weaknesses?
Potentially there are:
- Advantages in geography
- Advantages in technology
- Advantages in strategy and tactical leadership
- Advantages in command and control and discipline
Any battle where the smaller force has prevailed will have some or all of these elements.
Perhaps most famously used advantage is the use of geography.
Think of the 300 Spartans standing at the choke point of the Thermopylae, or the Minutemen on top of Bunker Hill in Boston.
If the smaller force can choose the ground on which to fight, the enemy’s strength in numbers can be not just mitigated but turned into a weakness.
For example; you can lure the larger force into a valley. This channels their advantage of force and eliminates the Larger army’s ability to create a larger front. On this well-chosen ground your force can attack from the higher ground at the side of the valley on the enemy’s flanks. This single tactic was how Hannibal destroyed more than one Roman army.
It’s even better if the valley runs into a swamp or is in a dense forest. That’s how the Goths and the Germans beat the technically superior Roman legions. The point is that by denying the opposing force their strength they are forced to meet your strength with their weakness and a smaller force can beat a larger force.
The general that can choose the ground has a distinct advantage.
Why do you care?
In your life you have situations where you compete with people and within organizations. It’s not just in sales. Everyone competes. In these situations you want to find the equivalent of choosing the ground. For you the ‘ground’ may be the agenda in a meeting or the place or timing of a meeting, or even the people invited to the meeting. You can control or influence the event in such a way that it plays to your strengths.
On the other side of the coin you can learn to develop a sense of when you’re walking into a trap. These are situations where someone else has chosen the ground and you will be at a disadvantage. It might be a competitor or an agenda item. Be slow to take offered bait because this is usually a trap.
If history tells us anything it is that you need to pick your battle spots. People have a tendency to be impatient and they want to get to the fight. If someone else has chosen the ground you should refuse to fight. This may mean declining that meeting or telling a customer ‘no’ until you can choose the ground.
This is your key take away; you can always refuse to fight. You don’t have to fight. It takes good generalship to refuse to give battle and wait patiently until the ground is in your favor.
This is very applicable to life. You know you have those situations where your gut is telling you it’s a setup and you’re walking into a trap. There is no reason you can’t say “I’m not comfortable with this and I’m not playing along.” Just by doing that you change the ground and force them to come to you.
How can technology play a role in helping a smaller force defeat a larger force?
Throughout history the army with the technology advantage, from Assyrian Chariots to Mongol compound bows, have had an advantage. If you have that technology with a first mover advantage, and you find a way to deploy it tactically so that it is a strength or negates an enemy strength you can win.
This is why businesses are so enamored with new technologies. These new technologies can give the first movers, (the people and companies who use them first or deploy them uniquely) a competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is jargon for more customers and higher profits than their direct competitors.
It’s not just innovation in specific technologies like stronger steel in your sword or faster breeds of horses. It can be innovation in process like the Greek Phalanx or Alexander’s cavalry tactics that create the advantage.
The important lesson to learn from innovation is that it is only a temporary advantage. The enemy will learn. Technological boundaries are porous and competitive differentiation through innovation only lasts until the technology or innovation becomes widely adopted. That’s why companies are always looking for new innovation.
The other lesson is that innovation can be risky as well. Not all innovation is good or applicable to competitive advantage. The best in class have it built into their culture to continuously test innovations and quickly deploy those that prove to be innovative.
In your life you need to have the same culture. You need to be able to embrace innovations and technologies in a way that reduces the risk but quickly gains the advantages. Don’t be afraid to try new things and fail, but be prepared to shift your approach when those innovations prove worthwhile.
What about the advantage produced by strategy and tactics?
We already talked about leadership which is the necessary underpinning of any success. What about tactics?
Tactics are extremely powerful if only for the fact that so few people and companies understand and use them. Alexander defeated larger armies with essentially the same tactic every time. He’d use a cavalry feint to the right and then cut back into the opposing center. Since the center is where the opposing king was, this caused surprise and chaos and cut off the head of the opposing force. Once Darius took flight the rest of his army crumbled from the center and the rest, as they say, is history.
Rommel and Napoleon both used a flanking tactic with a mobile force to rout larger forces. A simple tactic of finding the opposing enemy’s flank and rolling around it with force was successful time after time until their opponents learned to expect the tactic and counter them.
There’s nothing tremendously magical about these tactics but the way they are executed focuses the army’s strength where it could be effective and creates a weakness. The larger army’s line is broken and their leadership is forced to react. You have the initiative.
Why do you care? Most real-world engagements are done with very little consideration of tactics. Most business engagements default to the equivalent tactic of a frontal assault. If you take away only one thing from this discussion it should be that a frontal assault is the most expensive way to approach a problem.
Sun Tsu said that you should not employ a frontal assault unless you have at least a 3 to 1 advantage – and that’s with all other things being equal. It is a poor tactician that attacks head on in any personal or business engagement.
You need to survey the lines of the opposing force and look for their strong points and their weak points. You focus your strength where they are weak and this is typically a version of a flanking tactic. In the business world this could mean changing a selection criteria or changing an agenda, introducing a challenge at the right time or changing the timing of a process.
SunTsu always counseled that the good general will demonstrate on all fronts and attack where the opponent is weak. What this means is your opponent will know that you want to attack with your strength and they will be expecting it.
To throw them off balance you feint to other places and when they react to those feints, you launch your attack on the weak points. Keep feinting along a broad front and make them react. Once you’ve got them reacting, you control the battle, or the business deal.
Your take away here is to study tactics and use them as leverage to win your personal battles. Understand the favored tactics of your enemy. Use tactics to your advantage and don’t be predictable.
Command, control and discipline.
How do you make sure that you win when you are trapped in the fog of war? You do this with discipline.
The classic Roman legion would routinely beat larger barbarian forces by simply being disciplined. Shoulder to shoulder with shields and short stabbing swords would calmly let the undisciplined barbarian forces break around them like a rock in the middle of a stream.
They had smaller forces but they had a professional army with practiced warfare techniques. The opposing forces were ill equipped and untrained farmers. A smaller veteran force can use their discipline and experience to win.
How does this apply to your life? It is the same practice and drilling of basic business skills, like giving presentations and answering you top ten hard questions. These should be practiced until they are a automatic and effective response.
Discipline itself will not guarantee a win, but without discipline you are sure to lose. When the blood starts to fly, in the heat of battle, when your heart rates soars, in the moment of truth you want your discipline to take over, not your ‘fight or flight’ response.
Wrapping it up…
There is no silver bullet here. It is a body of knowledge that you need to acquire throughout life. You need to understand the art of the possible so that when you see the patterns of the battles in your life unfold you know what your options are.
Because even if you are trapped and outnumbered you are the general of your life.
Let me leave you with a story. After the Roman conquest of Britain there was a tribe that aligned with Rome called the Iceni. Prasutagus was the king of the Iceni and his queen was Boudica. When Prasutagus died the Roman governor Seutonious decided the Iceni didn’t need their kingdom anymore he marched in beat Boudica, raped her daughters, chucked out all the nobility and annexed the Iceni lands. (Seutonius was a bit of a jerk).
Boudica raised an army of 100,000 Britons and began laying waste to all the Roman cities.
Seutonius was forced to face the British army of 100,000 pissed of celts with 1,200 legionaries. He won the battle.
How did he do it?
He chose the ground on which to fight. He put his flanks up against Hadrian’s wall and made Boudica’s army come to him. He burnt the Roman stores so that Boudica’s force was starving and exhausted going into the battle. His men were few but they were a veteran and disciplined fighting force.
The undisciplined and exhausted Britons broke against his strength and Boudica’s amry was slaughtered.
Understand the history of war. Read your Sun Tsu, your Julius Caesar and your Machiavelli. Humans haven’t changed in 7,000 years and the lessons are all current.